We talked about the project of a business center on Ilyich Square in 2007. It was realized in 2014 and for several years now has been serving as a landmark of the square - large, clearly visible from afar: from the Garden Ring in front of the bridge over the Yauza, from the Entuziastov highway from the Third Ring, from the Kursk railway bridge, from Sergiy Radonezhsky street and, in the historical perspective, Shkolnaya street.
In general, the main themes of the project were definitely implemented - the concept of open city gates was very integral in the form of a hinged connection of two different, but equally large plates, at an angle, with a high opening between them.
“The Vladimirskaya road used to go along Shkolnaya street, this is its old route, here on the square it crossed with Kamer-Kollezhsky Val,” says Pavel Andreev. - There are no shafts, memories of them are preserved only in the names, there is no outpost, there is only a square. Therefore, we took the liberty of calling our project "Vladimir's Gate" and interpreting the building - of course, not literally, rather conditionally, but still in an obvious way - as a gate, part of the city's border. Then the owners renamed it the Golden Gate, by analogy with the Golden Gate in Vladimir, or Golden gate - a pretentious commercial interpretation in the year of the time.
Our idea was urban planning: we returned the historical symbol to the place, resurrecting it on a new modern scale."
The gate to Vladimir is, of course, an image that is collective and borrowed not so much from historical reality, but, indeed, from the town-planning situation. The Rogozhskaya outpost was not at all like that - built in the last third of the 18th century, it consisted of two low guardhouses with arched galleries and obelisks - the constant companions of the Catherine's outposts.
There were two squares at the outpost: the current Shkolnaya led to the more ancient Sennaya, which, in fact, was once strung on the old Vladimirka, and the Rogozhskaya Zastava square next door was relatively new. Now both squares have merged into one and are lost - they have disappeared in a traffic intersection overlooking a railway bridge, surrounded on one side by old Moscow two-story houses, and on the other by 12-story panel buildings of the mid-1980s, the last echo of great construction projects - although they are typical, but lined up along the street along the "red" line, in front of them there are "porches" designed to adapt to the neighborhood of historical buildings, to reduce the scale of perception.
In a word, the place is contrasting, here several eras and urban directions converged.
Pavel Andreev's business center “caught” well and embodied this contrast. Two towers: one has 26 floors with a small technical mezzanine: it is faced with pale-yellow porcelain stoneware, is subordinated to a strict pattern of moderately vertical windows and stretches along the Entuziastov highway, thus figuratively belonging to the exit route from the city. The design of the windows and the color of the facade echo the neighboring seven-story building of the "Stalinist" period, house number two on Rogozhsky Val - although the tower is more than three times taller, it, in some way, continues the line of the street, picking up the rhythm, but making it denser and more frequent … This is especially noticeable from the beginning of Shkolnaya Street.
The second tower is 24-storey, all its facades are covered with tinted glass of varying degrees of transparency and shades: earlier in Moscow this technique was used by the architects of the Ostozhenka bureau in the Panorama residential complex. But the trick is a trick, and here it helps to turn the tower into a solid block of dark glass: it grows out of the pavement without any base, right there - there was a paving tile, and immediately - glass. The idea was to disguise the interfloor floors, making the second tower completely solid and somewhat surreal, emphatically modern - and it succeeded.
Although according to the original plan the glass tower was supposed to be darker and was designed for a hotel, now both high-rise volumes are occupied by the office premises of the business center. I must admit that the original idea was a little tougher, but more detailed, especially due to the high-tech antennas at the southern facade. Now it is a solid prism, it seems to have been carved out of some kind of iceberg of dark water. Of course, you can count the floors if you want, but this is only if you look closely: the volume is solid, colored, besides, it is sensitive to lighting, constantly changing its shade, and is especially good at sunset, because its main facade is western.
The glass tower stretches along the Rogozhsky shaft and echoes its lines; a kind of castling is obtained - a volume with windows, decided more traditionally, "goes beyond the city", and a more modern one fixes its historical border. The gate turned out - not in the literal sense, in any case, they stand on one side of the highway and by and large resemble rather one open sash. But this is even more interesting.
The most spectacular gesture is the passage console, with which the glass volume intrudes into the neighboring tower at a height of 22-24 floors; he was even noted on the website
a business center, which rarely happens in the Moscow context. Inside the console, you can see the zigzag truss added for strength: it was not originally planned, and the masking pattern of the glass façade is driven in part by the desire to hide the silhouette of the truss.
The intersection of the elements accentuates the angle of rotation and focuses attention on the large form, helping the building to fit into the scale of the new city: the place is borderline, but the city is growing, soon, a little to the east, the buildings of the Symbol residential complex will be completed on the site of the Hammer and Sickle plant. it seems, if not small, then intermittently diverse, will noticeably grow.
Meanwhile, the business center “catches” exactly the theme of the diversity of heights, complementing the two towers, so successfully docked with each other, with volumes of a smaller scale - five and four stories. One of them continues the light tower along the Enthusiasts Highway, the other is docked with an arch to the glass skyscraper from the side of the International Street; it houses the 2-star Netizen hostel, which is highly praised by its guests. Both wings do not imitate historical buildings and do not try to build along the streets neither a semblance of "Dutch houses", nor even a repetition of Shkolnaya Street. Their facades are technically solved in approximately the same way as the first tower - made of porcelain stoneware. There is even an element of deconstruction in them: a large through grating rises above each building, as if the upper floor had been dismantled, but the frame remained.
The volumes diverge to the east, like scissors, forming a small trapezoidal courtyard, rather empty, but open to the townspeople, it can be crossed through, passing under a small bulkhead in front of the hotel, and then admiring the high passage - between the towers.
And if the small volume on the highway does not echo the neighboring buildings, but rather forms a five-story front along the highway, then the hotel on Mezhdunarodny Street continues to build neighboring buildings - rather curious five-story buildings made of silicate bricks with a square plan and a sharp gable roof uncharacteristic for Moscow (MG-2 series, mid 1950s). Mezhdunarodnaya Street remained low and cozy, it even seemed to be "hidden" behind the shield of the glass tower. So the business center, which definitely belongs to the future, in many ways grows out of the past, belongs to the environment, trying to connect the two. In this sense, he is the heir of the idea, which from its time gave birth to panel houses along the street Sergiy Radonezhsky, attempts to connect two scales and completely different times, showing respect for different types of buildings, "reconcile" them.
Walking around is quite pleasant, although there is no "green" improvement - only city paving. But the abundance of cafes and services that populate the first floors is doing its job, turning the patch in front of the towers and behind them into a habitable and comfortable space. The impressions are complemented by round metal supports in the contour of the glass facade - the "cover" of the tower in front of the main entrance - as if the shell of the 26-storey building had soared upward, lifted, opening the opportunity for visitors to enter.
Underground, however, everything is quite complicated here. The lobby of the Rimskaya metro station runs under both towers, it is adjacent to the parking lot of the complex (the parking, however, due to the complexity of communications on the site, is made partly aboveground). In addition, Pavel Andreev, an architect who was invariably interested in ensuring that his projects organically and usefully fit into the city not only plastically and in terms of plot, but also technically, insisted that the engineering communications of the complex be enclosed in an underground collector, which the neighboring new buildings could would extend by connecting to it. Alas, the initiative was not supported: in particular, "Symbol" did not connect to this collector, and the system did not arise. Which, however, does not in any way devalue the attempt made at the Golden Gate to “do everything right”: it is possible that others will someday use this resource.
